The meat industry has faced the problem of removing the tough and unpalatable tendon tissue from meat fillets for many years. This problem is particularly troublesome in the poultry industry wherein the large tendon in breast tenderloin fillets is a particularly undesirable trait in providing a high grade meat portion for several food applications.
Presently the most commonly used methods involve manual cutting or trimming the tendon from the breast fillet using a knife or manually pulling the tendon with a pair of pliers to tear the tendon from the meat fillet. Both of these methods involve undesirably high labor costs.
There has been several prior attempts to automate the tendon removal process as evidenced by the apparatus disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,723,341; 5,133,688 and 4,359,807, for example.
Of these examples, U.S. Pat. No. 4,723,341 is more closely related to the present invention but uses a very different structural combination which has not been widely accepted as sufficiently satisfactory for adoption by the industry to replace manual processing methods.
Therefore there has long been a well-recognized, but unfulfilled need for an efficient, high production and economical automated tendon removal apparatus in the meat industry in general, and in particular, in the poultry industry where large volumes of the part of a turkey breast known in the industry as tenders or tenderloins are processed to meet various food applications.